OS X: Move Jobs Between Printers

How often do you try to print a document to the wrong printer? I gotta admit that I do it at least 20 percent of the time. That number, by the way, is completely accurate and isn’t at all pulled out of thin air. I promise.

In any case, you can actually move a job that you’ve sent to the wrong printer to the correct one. To do this efficiently, you’ll want to keep your printers’ queues in the Dock, so to add them, visit System Preferences> Printers & Scanners, click on a device, and then choose Open Print Queue.

When the printer’s icon appears in your Dock, right- or Control-click on it and choose Options> Keep in Dock.

Repeat those steps for all of the printers you use, and you’re ready to go! Now whenever you accidentally send a job to the wrong printer, what you’ll do is click on both the incorrect printer in your Dock and the correct one to bring up their queues at the same time.

Then just drag the job’s icon from the wrong device to the right one.

When you drop it there, the old printer will remove the job, and the new one will print it. Neat! Of course, this tip’ll work best if what you’re doing is accidentally printing to a device that’s off-site, say, or turned off; if the printer is actually available, the job will probably finish before you can walk through these steps. However, for those of you who use printers at multiple locations, this can be a pretty big time-saver!